


What to do after firing

by shrift



Category: Farscape
Genre: A Contemplation of Murder, Challenge Response, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-04-01
Updated: 2002-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shrift/pseuds/shrift
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the first day of the end of her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What to do after firing

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the "[The Stars Are Ours](http://www.shriftweb.org/leviathan/archive/2/thestars.html)" group challenge. Beta by the DRV girls

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,  
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,  
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,  
Today we have naming of parts.  
\--Henry Reed

 

Perhaps it will be today.

Nothing in the humid air portends it, nothing in the twin moons shining down and casting her shadow over a seed-heavy fern. Nothing in the clouds as they scud lightly across the indigo sky, obscuring the light from the stars overhead.

Zhaan looks up, baring her scalp. She looks up through the canopy of dripping leaves, vines twining up trunks, brightly-colored insects climbing the tangles of her distant brethren. She looks up at the stars that have just barely changed their path in her time on this planet.

It is not the stars she will miss, when she does this thing. This thing her people require to remain free, this thing she hopes her Goddess may find the generosity of spirit to forgive.

This thing she must call murder. Assassination.

She will kill Bitaal, her lover, because his beautiful pride is overtaking him and taking with him their entire race.

With him, she will kill a piece of her soul. She will not miss the stars. She might, she thinks, miss her soul.

Perhaps she will miss Bitaal most of all.

No, the stars are a weak light, transitory and fickle, leading the unwary traveler astray. Zhaan knows she will be sent up to live in the sky, in a sealed space ship with an artificial atmosphere abhorrent to her kind. She will be sent to a barren metal husk, where even the tiny microorganisms in the air die before they might reach her tongue.

Nothing living there to guide her, to give her strength. Nothing except the very beings who will imprison her.

The stars give no comfort. She craves the soil beneath her feet, the mud rising between her toes, the vegetation she can feel growing and stretching in the earth from which she came. It is her anchor, her life.

Over eight hundred cycles of existence, and this shall be her first separation from her mother.

Zhaan lowers her hood, moss-covered earth springy beneath her feet. She traces her steps back, careful not to bruise the soft flesh of leaves and stems.

Bitaal is waiting.

It will be today.


End file.
